A Short History of Everything- II

 

Won’t say too much here. I’m done with A Short History of Nearly Everything. As I had mentioned in the previous post, the second half of the book dealt with the history of life on planet Earth and how a series of flukes conveniently paved way for the dawn of homo sapiens.

It’s quite counter intuitive how we know more about the galaxies and stars that dot our skies than our oceans and seas. Apparently 99.9% of the species of organisms that currently inhabit our planet have not been discovered yet. There is a extremely high probability that an expedition into one of the major rain forests in the world could lead to the discovery of at least a dozen species that are currently unknown to man. The magnitude of our ignorance of organisms we share the planet with is kind of surprising, to say the least.

 

Big History

 

Recently, I viewed a TED Talk titled David Christian: The history of our world in 18 minutes. It was on a subject known as Big History. Big History, as the speaker David Christian explains, is an emerging academic field that undertakes a highly ambitious task of narrating the entire history of the universe, from the Big Bang to the present. It does so through a potpourri of scientific fields including astrophysics, geology, biology, anthropology etc. It is this polyamory of so many diverse fields that drew me to the subject and had me wanting for more.

A quick search for Big History books got me one clear winner: A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson. The book is considered as the Bible of the subject. I’ve gone through the first three chapters and I’ve not been disappointed. It is immensely beautiful as to how Bryson so seamlessly takes the discussion from the realms of Physics to explain universal laws such as that of gravitation to that of geology to explain the formation of mountains and calculating the age of the planet we inhabit.

Big History covers so many fields that I do not think I will be able to do justice to it by writing about it in just one post (Also, I haven’t even finished a tenth of Bryson’s book). Hence, I will be updating about the various eras of history that I’m learning and reading about. It will easily take up portions of about half a dozen posts.

As I mentioned earlier, I’m done with three chapters and I’m on the verge of completion of the fourth. So far, Bryson has explained the Big Bang, how the entire universe came out of a singularity, the nature of the solar system, the planets in it, the position of our planet in the Universe etc. in the first part of the book (Chapters 1-3). In Chapter 4, he turns his attention to our planet. What is its circumference, its mass, what kind of orbit it revolves around and why, why does it have mountains, the seas etc. The debates that have raged over these topics are definitely worth a read. I’m not even a tenth into the book and it has already given insights into the minds of over a dozen geniuses. Big History is a rough guide towards the entire field of science. To condense so many fields into a single subject may seem like an almost impossible task but if the TED Talks and the books are to be reviewed, I must say it has been wildly successful so far in its attempts.